Unscheduled landing by Italian plane

Press, 13 October 1982, Page 1

Unscheduled landing by Italian plane

N’ZPA San Juan. Puerto Rico

An Alitalia DCIO landed at San Juan, Puerto Rico, last evening during a non-stop flight from La Paz, Bolivia, where the jetliner took off early yesterday under mysterious circumstances reputedly involving an international drug bust.

An official said shortly before the plane landed that it would take off half an hour late for Rome.

A cablegram from Alitalia headquarters in Rome had advised of the stopover, the official said.

He quoted the message as saying that 36 passengers were aboard the jet, but none would get off at San Juan.

Earlier, reporters had been led to believe there was a hijacking. A diplomatic source in La Paz, however, who insisted on anonymity, said that this was a multi-governmental operation, complete with details worthy of a spy thriller, to get presumed cocaine dealers out of Bolivia.

Bolivia, generally regarded

as the world’s cocaine capital, this week installed a civilian administration that replaced a long string of military dictatorships widely accused of drug-linked corruption.

The new president, Dr Hernan Siles Zuazo, pledged to clamp down on the illegal drug trade and said that he would accept outside help. The diplomatic source told NZPA that with the new administration Finally in office, the time was right for an international drive against known cocaine dealers.

The press learned that something was amiss when a DCIO jetliner with the markings of the Italian airline, Alitalia, was seen on Monday in the south-eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz and yesterday was seen at La Paz airport 520 km away, surrounded for several hours by Bolivian Air Force police. Alitalia, which has no scheduled flight to Bolivia, refused all comment on the incident. It even denied, through its Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, office that any such plane was in Bolivia, even though the aircraft was reported as being there. A Santa Cruz newspaper, “El Mundo,” which photographed the plane, reported that 18 men wearing the green uniforms of Bolivia’s national police boarded the aircraft there, escorting a foreign-born local resident who had been wounded by a gunshot. Bolivian government aviation officials, usually reliable, “confirmed” to inquiring reporters that a lone hijacker had forced the plane off its normal flight path over neighbouring Brazil, to Santa Cruz, and that “armed men,” possibly “terrorists,” had boarded. These same sources even "confirmed” that the uniformed men were “paramilitary” thugs who had served the departed military regime.

The diplomatic source in La Paz said later, however, that any uniformed men aboard the jetliner probably were legitimate Bolivian policemen charged with controlling the persons thought to be drug dealers.